Comment of the Week

My little friend is not so little anymore, Toby! In fact, she's quite large! Enormous, in fact! Nine foot six and getting taller by the day! It's actually quite alarming! We're getting into I'm a Virgo territory here! Did you watch that miniseries, by the way? It was on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago! Jharrel Jerome is a treasure! Some great performances by Elijah Wood and Walton Goggins as well, which reminds me that I need to start my Justified rewatch. Oh, Margo Martindale is another treasure, especially as a voice in BoJack Horseman. Anyway, Olive is a giant, is the point I'm trying to make.

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Mark Trail, 12/6/04

Here’s what they don’t tell you when you decide to marry a taxidermist: you’re going to have perky young women showing up at your door at all hours with four-foot-long dead fish. It’s a good thing Kelly has a suitcase full of pink golf shirts back on the boat, because that one’s going to be pretty pungent.

Meanwhile, while Kelly and Birdie engage in meaningless chatter, the entire seaside community is menaced by TURT-LOR, KING OF THE SEA TURTLES! RUN, GIRLS, RUN!

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Curtis, 12/7/04

Boys, Curtis! He’s telling that you’re no good with girls, so you should start dating boys!

At least that’s what I’m getting out of this. Anyone who can offer another interpretation that makes any more sense, please let me know.

One thing I do like in this strip is the sign in the second panel from the left in the bottom row: “No hair cut below the neck.” When will the oppression of Hairy-Backed Americans end?

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The Phantom, 12/4/04

If you’ve read this feature regularly, you’ll know that there’s nothing that turns me on more than hot, hot discussion of geographical and cultural signifiers embedded in dialect. Thus, it’s rather surprising that, until I read today’s strip, I never really considered what sort of accent the hero of the Phantom might have. I mean, let’s see: scion of a family of mysterious obscenely wealthy vigilantes, of European descent, born and raised in somewhere that is probably southeast Africa, married to an American, which all should result in him sounding something like … Teresa Heinz Kerry, maybe?

Anyway, the thing that threw me in this strip is that our grumpy superhero displays his disdain for American sports scheduling by exclaiming “Blast!” In my experience, the only people who ever use this word as an interjection are British. Well, I mean, not my experience as such, as none of the British people I’ve known or encountered personally have ever done so, but, well, can you imagine a native English speaker shouting “Blast!” in any accent that isn’t British? Yeah, me neither. That might also explain why the Ghost-Who-Watches-Television-In-His-Hotel-Room is so discombobulated by the schedule: in the Commonwealth Formerly Known As The British Empire, their so-called “football” games are on TV essentially all the time, instead of the rational once-a-week schedule we’ve established here.

I still can’t linguistically explain that “Huh!” at the beginning of the sentence, though. But it’s worth noting that lovable wolf Devil eschews the pedestrian “Woof!” for a more naturalistic “Wrf!”

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